


Promotion

by Mertiya



Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: Chess, Drama, F/M, Romance, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 05:45:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes expected to die at Reichenbach Falls.  Someone else had a different idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Promotion

****

          Two brilliant geniuses (genii, as they themselves would protest), set in a duel to the death, a battle of titans, arms interlocked, hands and minds together grappling in an inescapable knot of conflict, unable to extricate themselves or each other, leading inexorably to the death of both.

            Unless, perhaps, the knot is Gordian.

            As Holmes catches Watson’s gaze, it is already too late, for him and for Moriarty, his death merely the last sacrificial move in the vast game of chess.  Checkmate.  In that instant, he sees the smallest movement of Watson’s facial muscles, and he closes his eyes to avoid catching that spark of sorrow he cannot endure.  And as he falls, there is nothing left but a deathly peace, the heavy roar and spray of the falls all about them, his foe’s arms crushing and clutching him and then releasing in the spread of a few moments, and he opens his eyes again, and in that long moment as he hangs suspended, he feels an unaccustomed weight heavy in his breast pocket.

            _As he pushes past one of the servers, he feels a slight nudge, but, for once, preoccupied with the approaching confrontation, fails to take note of it.  He catches the surprisingly heavy scent of perfume, and for an instant his attention wavers, his mind clutching at something, but he reins it in like a stubborn horse and sends it cantering after Moriarty once again._

            His hand, buffeted by the sprays of water, clutches, once, twice, and closes on an oddly shaped object which it recognizes instantly as Mycroft’s oxygen.  His eyes, still squeezed shut, force themselves open, a miniature gesture of surprise, and, with a mental shrug, he brings it to his mouth just before the black water beneath opens and swallows him whole.

            The water tosses him like a feather on the breeze, its power perhaps more frighteningly intense than anything he has experienced (with the exception, possibly, of the cocaine), and the pain of his injured arm is magnified and then chilled away, but his breaths, if hasty and snatched, are regular, and with the continued alertness afforded him by an oxygen-rich brain, he is able to chart the currents of the river in his head and, eventually, to scramble out onto the bank, shivering and shaking with cold and adrenaline.

            He pauses for a long moment, gazing out across the black water; he can see nothing of his adversary, and nothing of the excruciating journey he just endured.  All he can see are the lights, far above, of the peace summit, as it continues, and the lights caught, reflected and twinkling, in the darkness of the river, like stars caught and battered about the sky.  With a cough and a shudder, he pockets the oxygen and begins a long, painful hike toward civilization.

            He has time for thought before he reaches a little chalet, tucked snugly away amid fat, picturesque firs, time enough to come to a conclusion, he thinks, but he cannot.  Mycroft, perhaps, could have foreseen this, but Mycroft, clumsy, fat Mycroft, could not have delivered the oxygen in such a timely manner.  His brain, buffeted by cold (and a little fear? And maybe just a dollop of shock) and exposure, buzzes round in a most peculiar way.  He finds that it is difficult to adjust to living when every muscle in you has prepared for death.  It is agreeable, but difficult.

            He staggers into the chalet, icicles hanging from his eyelashes, his hair, rime coating even the scruffy, unshaven five o’ clock shadow.  He looks like death warmed over, with the reopened wound coating his upper shoulder in frozen blood.

            “Guten abend,” says the woman seated behind the desk, a heavy-browed peasant woman with a good-natured face and corn-colored hair pinned up in a crown on her head.  “Herr Holmes?”

            “Ja,” he responds, slipping into German with no more than a touch of English in his vowels, still too dazed to wonder at the woman’s placid reaction.

            “Gut,” she says.  “Folgen Sie mich, bitte.  Ich nehme Sie zu dem Zimmer.”

            _Follow me.  I’ll take you to your room._

            She takes up a candle and leads him down a small, well-decorated hallway, and, God help him, he follows, because for once he’s caught in something he doesn’t understand and if it ends in his death, well, it was already supposed to, ultimately.

            It isn’t until her offhand remark as she opens the door of room 221 that, “Ihre Frau wartet,” _your wife is waiting_ , and the overpowering smell of perfume that wafts to his nostrils, kicking him back to a day full of stunned pain, that he begins to comprehend.

~

            To be honest, she arrived scant minutes before he did, having quietly taken her leave from the summit and procured a carriage, rather than taking the shortcut down the mountain and hoofing it on foot from the riverbank.  She has little time to worry about whether her plan has succeeded before the door is opening and he’s stepping through, along with Frau Morgenstern, a woman worth her weight in gold.

            He looks a little worse than she expected.  She wasn’t expecting quite so much blood, and in her haste to seat the oxygen in his pocket at Reichenbach, she managed to miss the heavy dark circles beneath his eyes and the extra curl of white hairs at his brow. 

            He crosses the room to her in a bare moment, his leggy stride making short work of the paltry boards standing between them, and in an instant, she sees a dull pain behind his eyes well up into the barest hint of moisture, and he has taken her hand, shuddering, and pressed it to his lips.  That one moment of naked emotion is all she gets (but it’s more than she was expecting), and then the shades are down over his eyes once more, and it’s with an almost carefree smile that he says, “Mrs. Adler!  Just how many lives have you got?”

            Her smile isn’t quite as carefree, as she waves to Frau Morgenstern to leave them, but she manages to twist it into a smirk at the last moment.  “My dear Mr. Holmes, apparently as many as you have.”

            “Good thinking,” he says, fishing Mycroft’s oxygen from his pocket and slapping it onto the bedside table.  “Wish I’d thought of it, really.  Makes me look like a buffoon, being outsmarted by a woman.”

            “Mr. Holmes, you need to learn that the best way to a lady’s heart is not through reckless insults,” she says, leading him sternly to the bed.  “Let me take a look at these injuries.”

            “Besting me, that I’ll accept,” he says, then winces and sucks in air as she reaches for his bleeding shoulder.  “Ouch!  Stop that at once, woman!”

            “It needs rebandaging,” she says steadily.  “And for once your doctor friend isn’t here to do it for you.”

            He doesn’t say anything, just rolls his eyes pathetically at her but stops objecting as she brings out fresh bandages and gauze and starts redressing a horribly deep cut whose edges are puckered and bruised badly.

            “As I was saying,” he continues, punctuating her every motion with an explosive expletive, “You’ve bested me before and by this time I suppose I should have come to accept it, but to beat both me and Professor Moriarty at our own game.”

            “I didn’t really beat him,” she says absently.  “It’s just as easy to beat either of you; neither of you think a woman is anything more than a pawn, in any case.”

            He sniffs loudly.  “Now I am getting the sniffles,” he says pathetically, and she rolls her eyes at him.  “I am absolutely freezing.” 

            He is quite cold at that, she can feel the chill still on his naked flesh as he sits there shirtless, endeavoring to look utterly pathetic.

            “He almost had me,” she admits with a shudder.  “Lucky I never drink tea served to me in his company.  Fortunately, his method of disposing of the body was to send a much less perceptive and savory individual to dump it into the river.  I thought I’d never get the stench of the Thames out of my hair.”

            “It’s not so much that I think _women_ are pawns,” he continues.  “It’s just that chess is a two-player game, you know.”

            “Then perhaps you’d better get off your high horse and admit you weren’t playing chess.”  She rolls her eyes at him, and he looks sadly, almost tragically, back at her.

            With a grin, she pushes him back against the mattress of the bed, shifting her ridiculous numbers of skirts up to straddle him properly.

            “But we _were_ playing chess,” he objects as she bends to kiss him, and continues speaking even as their lips meet.  “I can quote you the moves and everything.”

            “All right,” she says lazily, teasing at his lips with her tongue.  “In that case, I shall just remind you the fate of an ignored pawn can easily be to reach the end of the board, where she awaits promotion.”

            He grins and grabs her around the waist.  With a quick twist of his hips he flips them, pinning her beneath him.

            “Ah,” he smiles, reaching for the buttons of her dress.  “That’s different.  Very clever, my resurrected Queen.”

**Author's Note:**

> I got really rather irritated at Irene Adler's death in A Game of Shadows. It just felt like she was arbitrarily stuffed in the fridge. So I decided that I had to fix that.


End file.
